John Resig : ExtJS is very sneaky and quite disingenuous

Here's what John Resig, JQuery lead has to say about ExtJS

"ExtJS is a giant licensing fail pile masquerading as an open source project in a thinly-veiled attempt to force more people to buy their corporate licenses. Unless you're willing to shell out the big money, stay far - far - away.

They're using 'open source' as a buzzword selling point to lure companies in, befuddle them with confusing viral licensing, and obligate them (through the obvious balking that the corporate lawyers will do) to get them to buy a full, corporate, license. It's very sneaky, quite disingenuous, and paints a bad picture for open source development as a whole.

We (the jQuery project) worked hard with them to try and fix bugs and add features for an ExtJS integration layer. They turned around and built their own, specialized, library (removing the need for any of our work) and then mutated the licensing into this bizzaro scheme that they have now. We can't, in good consciousness, even recommend their library anymore due to its very nature. On top of this they ended up hiring our lead evangelist to promote their work. I can't speak for everyone on the team but I feel quite frustrated and used.

They're providing a great disservice to the Open Source community in general. They consume with reckless abandon, it's impossible to even hope to borrow code from them, and they turn it all into a money-making machine. No aspect of that sits well with me."

Source : http://reddit.com/info/6gli8/comments/c03s6s9